Hello everyone! I would like to extend my apologies to everyone for all the bumps and bruises you may have acquired during our server migration that we’ve been working on for the last few weeks. Basically the dedicated Dual Xeon box that hosts Pixel2life.com and the my other sites was starting to peak during peak traffic hours and slowing to a crawl. We also had some frontpage exposure on Digg (Both P2L and my blog had separate mentions) that brought the site down to it’s knees and eventually everything was non-functional.

To take action on this, it was decided that a second dedicated box was required to help lighten the load, so another dual Xeon box was brought in but then we ran into issues setting up a vlan for the two machines and that had to be scraped. ThePlanet did a bit of tap dancing and finally Ty and I got pretty fed up and we started applying some pressure for something that would work. Low and behold, ThePlanet was just about to introduce some seriously kick ass new hardware and as it turns out, some perfect gear for what I needed. They have some awesome new quad CPU boxes (Dual Core Dual Opterons) that would out perform the proposed solution of running 2 dual Xeon boxes, plus I would get to run 64-bit Apache!

So, the changes were made this weekend, but we had some stability issues while compiling and some other road blocks that led to a bit of downtime that led to several hundred emails to Jay and I. As of now, the server has been stable for about 32 hours, so it looks like we managed to get the wrinkles ironed out and all of P2L network sites are up and running. At this moment, images may seem to load a bit slow because Keepalive is off while we ensure everything else is running well, but we plan to re-enable it tonight.

That’s about it for server drama and hopefully we’ve cleared all the major hurdles until we need to upgrade again 😉

Dan